1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a mobile telephone device with an idle screen. The term ‘mobile telephone device’ refers to any kind of small screen (e.g. A5 size or less) portable electronic device with voice communications capabilities, including radio telephones, smart phones, communicators and wireless information devices. The term ‘idle screen’ refers to the default screen displayed when the mobile telephone device is switched on and therefore capable of receiving a voice call. The idle screen is the screen which is displayed when the user is not navigating to a particular function, nor actively using a particular application, such as a contacts application, or a messaging application. Personal computers have no equivalent to an idle screen.
2. Description of the Prior Art
One of the problems facing the designers of mobile telephone devices is how to allow the user to access data and activate a desired function. Conventionally, the small display size (i.e. under A5 size) associated with a mobile telephone device has meant that functions need to be layered into multiple hierarchies: the interface can be thought of as having many layers, with the user having to first locate the correct top level function and then, within that function, progressively drill down (sometimes through 3 or more layers) to reach the target function. Finally, the user has to select an appropriate option to actually complete the required task. Navigating through multiple levels and performing numerous selections of various options can be both confusing and tedious for a user; often used functions can be rendered inconveniently inaccessible.
As an example, many mobile telephone devices now have internet WAP access to retrieve information from remote information sources; a WAP micro-browser currently typically enables simplified, text only WAP pages or ‘cards’ to be viewed. Reading WAP information on a mobile telephone device typically involves however the following multi-stage navigation process: (i) turn the client device on; (ii) view an idle screen; (iii) navigate from the idle screen to open the appropriate application (e.g. a micro-browser); (iv) select the required resource (e.g. open a particular WAP page); (v) enter a password and username; (vi) select the required information; (vii) wait for the download; and finally (viii) view the required information. This process is sufficiently slow and complicated to be unattractive to many users, especially the non-computer literate users to whom mobile telephone devices are particularly aimed.
Various attempts at improving menu accessibility by making more efficient use of the available screen ‘real estate’ have been proposed. For example, EP 891066 to Nokia Mobile Phones Ltd. teaches the approach of placing the most used functions in a mobile telephone into a particular menu list of the most commonly used functions. Hence, a user has to navigate first to the menu list of the most used functions, then select from within that list the required function. This saves the user having to navigate through potentially many more layers of the menu system to find and select the required function.
It will be appreciated that the field of Personal Computer (‘PC’) user interaction design is non-analogous to mobile telephone device user interaction design because a PC has a far larger screen size; hence, multiple application windows or their associated icons can be simultaneously displayed. Navigating between these windows/icons is generally a straightforward process of moving a mouse controlled cursor to the applicable window/icon. The user interaction designer working in the mobile telephone field however has a far more constraining environment to work within because of the very limited screen size. Another reason why mobile telephone device user interaction design is fundamentally different from that of PC user interaction design is that there is no equivalent to the idle screen in a PC.
Although the closest PC arts are non-analogous for the reasons given above, we note for completeness that in the PC domain, it is known to have a customisable web browser bar that a user can program to show information of interest to that user (e.g. a news ticker; a stock quote ticker etc.). But even here, a user still needs to (i) turn the client device on; (ii) view a startup screen; and (iii) progress from the start-up screen to open the browser application. If the browser has a permanent internet connection, a user may keep the browser application open, with the browser bar visible somewhere in the PC screen or readily selectable. But invariably the bulk of the screen will be occupied not with the small browser bar (with user selected information categories) but with one or more windows running applications (e.g. a word processing application etc.), exploiting the large screen size.
Reference may also be made to Phone.com EP 1043905, which shows using the idle screen of a mobile telephone to display adverts and other information selected and sent by the network provider, but not information of a kind selected by the user. Geoworks WO 00/77979 shows using a mobile telephone to display adverts, but not on an idle screen and not information of a kind selected by the user. Hence, this prior art fails to show the idea of using the idle screen to display updated (e.g. WAP pulled) information of a kind selected by the user.
On a more theoretical basis, an effective user interface enables the user to comprehend the changing internal status of the mobile telephone device as navigation proceeds. For example, to select or initiate a function (e.g. to open an address book function, enter a PIN security number or to alter the ring melody) a user has to understand (a) how to navigate to that function in order to select that function and (b) that the status of the telephone is such that the function can be selected or initiated. The technical problem of effectively enabling the internal state of the mobile telephone device to enable a user to view information from a remote resource without having to perform multiple navigation steps has to date been inadequately addressed.